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What do we want? South-facing windows!

By Ivor Williams | The Conservative Woman | August 2, 2021

YOU may have read recently that ‘Britain is failing to protect its vulnerable citizens. Thousands of preventable deaths could be triggered every year.’ You may have supposed that some road safety organisation was at it again, worried about silent electric cars. Or maybe it was the RNLI having a go about inflatables on the beach. Possibly the opposition playing safe and attacking the crime rate or the NHS?

There’s a clue in the next sentence. ‘As global heating worsens and heatwaves become more frequent, the problem is likely to worsen significantly.’ This is Baroness Brown of Cambridge, a member of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), and she goes on to claim that by 2050 there could be three times as many heat-related deaths as there are today.

This is a Guardian piece about the CCC’s comments on a Met Office warning about hotter summers, so let’s stop here and take a deep breath of reality.

The number of heat-related summer deaths are monitored by Public Health England. The three years 2017-19 averaged 847, but in 2020 there were 2,556, in line with 2003 (2,334) and 2006 (2,323). Let’s be fair and assume global warming will continue, so over the next few years we may have a yearly average of 2,500, then (according to the CCC) on to 7,500 by 2050.

Back in Wonderland there’s apparently no need to worry. The Telegraph has reassuring news from its Environment Editor, Emma Gatten. The CCC, she says, ‘called for the introduction of new regulations to ensure developers were not building homes that are uninhabitable as temperatures rise  . . . Measures that can easily be incorporated when building new homes include avoiding large south-facing windows, including external shutters, trickle vents, green roofs, and green walls covered in vegetation.’

There we are, then, problem solved. However, the world that you and I live in has a season called winter when it gets cold even here in the UK, and there is, of course, an opposite effect. Again Public Health England has the data: ‘Cold-related deaths represent the biggest weather-related source of mortality in England, and on average, there are approximately 35,000 excess winter deaths each year in England and Wales.’

Being kind and using the CCC’s figure for 2050, there are still over four and a half times as many excess deaths in winter as in summer. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation looked at the problem some time ago. Not surprisingly, they found that ‘the magnitude of the winter excess was greater in people living in dwellings that appear to be poorly heated. The percentage rise in deaths in winter was greater in those dwellings with low energy-efficiency ratings, and those predicted to have low indoor temperatures during cold periods’.

There are wide variations on recommended indoor warmth in winter. The Met Office must employ all young, hot-blooded people, because they say ‘you should heat your home to the temperature of at least 18°C. This is particularly important if you have reduced mobility, are 65 or over, or have a health condition, such as heart or lung disease.’

For the last twenty years I have been cold from October to March, and have recently become a nonagenarian so will probably be even colder this winter. The figure of 18 is ridiculous. I live in a reasonably well-insulated house with gas central heating; the winter thermostat setting is 21 or above and even then the winter clothing level is four layers.

The heat pump threat has receded by five years, but these things are notorious for their inability to warm a house properly. The CCC want smaller south-facing windows but the cheapest source of additional heat even in winter is the sun. Any day that it’s available let it shine in through south-facing windows. Have shutters for summer.

The CCC say possibly 7,500 excess summer deaths by 2050. But they seem to be relying on our climate warming unbelievably quickly to save 35,000 of us going shivering to our doom every winter.

August 2, 2021 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Malthusian Myth Busting: Easter Island Edition

By David Middleton | Watts Up With That? | July 15, 2021

You know the story…

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals
to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow
their lead?

Jared Diamond, 2005

While it is true that the Easter Islanders deforested their island, forensic historians have now determined that by converting the forest to farmland and innovatively adapting to prolonged Little Ice Age droughts, they avoided collapse.

BingUNews

Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong

By Jennifer Micale
JULY 08, 2021

You probably know this story, or a version of it: On Easter Island, the people cut down every tree, perhaps to make fields for agriculture or to erect giant statues to honor their clans. This foolish decision led to a catastrophic collapse, with only a few thousand remaining to witness the first European boats landing on their remote shores in 1722.

But did the demographic collapse at the core of the Easter Island myth really happen? The answer, according to new research by Binghamton University anthropologists Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo, is no.

Their research, “Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island),” was recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Co-authors include Enrico Crema of the University of Cambridge, Timothy Rieth of the International Archaeological Research Institute and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui in the native language, has long been a focus of scholarship into questions related to environmental collapse. But to resolve those questions, researchers first need to reconstruct the island’s population levels to ascertain whether such a collapse occurred and, if so, the scale.

“For Rapa Nui, a big part of scholarly and popular discussion about the island has centered around this idea that there was a demographic collapse, and that it’s correlated in time with climate changes and environmental changes,” explained DiNapoli, a postdoctoral research associate in environmental studies and anthropology.

Sometime after it was settled between the 12th to 13th centuries AD, the once-forested island was denuded of trees; most often, scholars point to human-prompted clearing for agriculture and the introduction of invasive species such as rats. These environmental changes, the argument goes, reduced the island’s carrying capacity and led to a demographic decline.

Additionally, around the year 1500, there was a climactic shift in the Southern Oscillation index; that shift led to a dryer climate on Rapa Nui.

[…]

In short, there is no evidence that the islanders used the now-vanished palm trees for food, a key point of many collapse myths. Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps.

Construction of the moai statues, considered by some to be a contributing factor of collapse, actually continued even after European arrival.

In short, the island never had more than a few thousand people prior to European contact, and their numbers were increasing rather than dwindling, their research shows.

“Those resilience strategies were very successful, despite the fact that the climate got drier,” Lipo said. “They are a really good case for resiliency and sustainability.”

Burying the myth

Why, then, does the popular narrative of Easter Island’s collapse persist? It likely has less to do with the ancient Rapa Nui people than ourselves, Lipo explained.

The concept that changes in the environment affect human populations began to take off in the 1960s, Lipo said. Over time, that focus became more intense, as researchers began to consider changes in the environment as a primary driver of cultural shifts and transformations.

But this correlation may derive more from modern concerns with industrialization-driven pollution and climate change, rather than archaeological evidence. Environmental changes, Lipo points out, occur on different time scales and in different magnitudes. How human communities respond to these changes varies.

[…]

Binghamton University

However future forensic historians (archaeologists & anthropologists) will be right when they determine that our society collapsed because we decimated our reliable and affordable energy infrastructure in order to build a lot of useless statues due to “modern concerns with industrialization-driven pollution and climate change.”

Myth Busting…

The full text of the paper is available… Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

Discussion

When we assess the uncertainties of the Rapa Nui data and those involved in the analytic steps, the current evidence indicates that the island experienced relatively steady population growth from initial human settlement ca. 800 cal BP until the period following European arrival. The “wiggles” in the observed SPD curve all fall within the simulation envelope and result from details of the calibration curve combined with sampling error, and importantly, not genuine paleodemographic signals. Given these facts, we are unable to confidently distinguish between the four hypotheses. All of the fitted models, however, are consistent with a logistic growth pattern only marginally influenced by changes in climate and forest cover. The wide HPDs of the environmental parameters suggest a range of possible positive or negative effects, yet no values appear strong enough to cause major population declines (Fig. 3). Given the comparatively small number of radiocarbon dates, we cannot determine whether our inability to discern between the competing models is the consequence of small sample size, the small ‘effect size’ in models 2–4 (i.e., the absolute deviation of βpalm and βSOI from 0), or a combination of both factors. Nonetheless, none of the fitted models support the notion of pre-contact population collapse (Fig. 3). Therefore, our results suggest that if deforestation or increasing SOI had effects on the island, Rapa Nui populations were resilient to them. These findings are independently supported by recent research showing that monument construction steadily continued even after European arrival57,77. In addition, research now demonstrates that deforestation was a prolonged process, did not result in catastrophic erosion, and that land cover was quickly replaced by lithic mulch gardens that increased agricultural productivity66,67,80,81,82,83,84,85. Moreover, while some claim that deforestation resulted in the loss of food29,68, there is no evidence that palms were a significant dietary resource for islanders66,86. Thus, it is more likely that the loss of the palm forest represented an expansion of cultivation opportunities and positively contributed to the initial growth and overall resilience of the population. In summary, there is no empirical support for the notion that deforestation resulted in strong negative impacts on the human population of Rapa Nui.

Our results also have implications for the effects of climate change on the island. Rull71,73 has recently claimed that climate-induced droughts caused a large-scale societal disruption resulting in the cessation of monument construction and intra-island migration from coastal settlements to the crater lake at Rano Kau. Similar to previous analyses of the tempo of monument construction around the island57, the vast majority of our 14C data derive from coastal settlements and do not show declines in activity or support claims of major climate-induced disruptions from drought. While climate perturbations seem to have led to desiccation of the crater lake at Rano Raraku72, recent research suggests Rapa Nui populations adapted to these changes by relying primarily on coastal groundwater sources87,88,89.

DiNapoli et al., 2021

It turns out that the Malthusian myth of Easter Island’s demographic and ecological collapse was just a bunch of Rapa Hooey!

Reference

DiNapoli, R.J., Crema, E.R., Lipo, C.P. et al. Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Nat Commun 12, 3939 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24252-z

July 15, 2021 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

How Would You Prepare Your Former Self for the Age of Covid?

By Michael Curzon | Lockdown Sceptics | July 13, 2021

We are publishing an excellent comment today by reader Jimi Cazot that he wrote in response to a Telegraph article on the introduction of Covid vaccine passports. Jimi asks: “If you could go back 10 years and speak to your former self, what would you tell that unsuspecting fool?” His answer below is bound to resonate with many readers.

In the future, many of your national assets will be owned by China. Most of the goods you buy will be made there too, which you will not purchase from your fellow countrymen but a sole supplier owned by an American.

The most successful politicians will not be elder statesmen committed to public service but young upstarts who view the job as a stepping stone towards tremendous personal wealth in later life.

Your Government will pass bills to quash peaceful protest and enable the recruitment of child spies. This won’t be limited to the intelligence services but bodies like the environmental and food standards agencies too. When you ask “why”, nobody will be able to tell you.

Your Government will set up ‘nudge units’ staffed by unknown behavioural scientists. They will tell you what to eat, drink and how you should behave. There will be patronising health and safety signs everywhere you look.

“The media will grow dependent on Government advertising revenue and cease reporting opinions and events that contradict official narratives.

The internet will be dominated by a small number of big-tech companies who will delete all information that they disagree with.

In the name of safeguarding students from harm, schools and universities will cease debate and enquiry. People with contrary views will be barred from campuses. Even student newspapers will be censored by ‘sensitivity readers’.

At work, you will be made to undergo psychological re-education. The people lecturing you will have no knowledge of psychology but nonetheless try to change you at a subconscious level.

People will be sacked from their jobs for saying there are two biological sexes or for telling an ill-judged joke. They will not be forgiven if they apologise.

Every major institution and employer will sign up to this censorious culture and soon you will censor yourself when speaking to friends and colleagues without even knowing that you’ve done so.

When a virus emerges that only kills 0.3% of those who catch it – the majority of which older than the average span of a life – you will be bombarded, 24-hours a day, by terrifying public messaging.

The police will stop you from meeting a friend for a coffee in the park. They will rummage through your shopping bags to make sure you’ve only bought things that they deem essential. They will film you as you walk in the countryside and put the footage on the internet so to shame you.

Neighbour will be told to spy on neighbour, and when you have friends round for dinner the police will knock on your door and give you a fine.

You will be told to stay two metres away from other people at all times. You will be made to wear a facemask even though there’s no evidence that they do anything at all. When this becomes apparent, scientists will say you must wear them so as not to frighten other people. Your freedom will end where another’s fear begins.

Families will be kept from dying loved ones. Widows will be denied the comfort of human touch. Daughters will be arrested for collecting their mothers from care homes.

Vast numbers of children will be sent home from school and denied a proper education just because one classmate lost their sense of smell.

Weddings will be cancelled. Nightclubs will be closed. Churches will be shut. Singing and dancing will be prohibited. Lovers will be kept apart.

Vaccines will be created using messenger ribonucleic acid technology. When the inventor of that technology warns against its use by those at little risk from the virus, records of him will be expunged and someone more ‘helpful’ will be credited with his work.

You will be told that the vaccine isn’t compulsory, yet those who refuse might be sacked from their jobs. They will be made to queue for longer at airports. They will be put under house arrest if they come into contact with someone who has the virus, whilst those who have had the shot will not. They will be stopped from going to bars and stadiums. There will be two classes of people: the clean and the unclean.

Your unassailable and decadent leaders will ignore the rules they set for others again and again, blissfully untroubled by the cries of hypocrisy.

Global leaders, bureaucrats, scientists, royalty and the super-rich will meet in private to discuss how we all must live. They’ll say there are too many people and not enough resources, but nobody will ask who we should get rid of and how. Blinded by hubris, they’ll believe that they alone can bring about a utopian future. The language they speak will be impenetrable to most, it made up of meaningless phrases like ‘stakeholder capitalism’, ‘collectivisation’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘Build Back Better’. Every now and then, however, they’ll make things very clear: “You will own nothing. You will rent everything. You will be happy.”

Few will question what this means, how it will be brought about or what mandate they have for doing so. Those who do, or any of the above, will be insulted, ridiculed and so pushed to the margins of society that they are effectively silenced.

Most will stand on their front doorstep at 8pm every Thursday, clapping their hands and bashing saucepans.

Now, what do you think your former self would say?

July 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

Blinded with science

By Ivor Williams | The Conservative Woman | July 13, 2021

FEW MPs have a science background, which is why the government needs scientific advice. Sage, for instance: the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies provide scientific and technical advice to support government decision-makers during emergencies. Since early last year we have had a great deal of advice from them and there have been (and still are) times when they are clearly running the country.

How do these 87 scientists from different fields agree about how to deal with Covid-19? Another group, HART: the Health Advisory and Recovery Team, point out that ‘A lot of what people have come to regard as clear scientific consensus over the last year is nothing of the sort. The voices of scientists with different views have simply not been heard.’

A similar thought must have occurred to Sir David King, scientific adviser to the Government 2000-2007. Last year he formed Independent Sage, which their website says is ‘a group of scientists who are working together to provide independent scientific advice to the UK government and public on how to minimise deaths and support Britain’s recovery from the Covid-19 crisis.

Sir David is the expert responsible for advising the UK government to encourage the sale of diesel cars, and who said in 2004 that ice in Antarctica was only 40 per cent as thick as it used to be, even though there was no evidence then (or now) to support such a wild statement.

Why are so many scientists working for us? We now have proper-Sage, still busily advising/instructing the government. Then we have pseudo-Sage, busily telling us what we should really be doing. Curious.

But there’s more, even more curious.

Global warming scientific advice comes from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), whose purpose is ‘to advise the UK and devolved governments on emissions targets and to report to Parliament on progress made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for and adapting to the impacts of climate change’.

It is chaired by Lord Deben, otherwise John Selwyn Gummer (who read history at Cambridge), and has about a dozen members. In May 2019 they said the UK must aim to reach net zero by 2050. Again there seems to be no disagreement between members about either the reasonableness of this target if Asian countries continue to build coal-fired power stations, or the possible enormous cost to householders of their recommendations.

How were these people chosen? How can they be so dogmatic about such an uncertain topic? How can they possibly recommend such extreme actions? Our climate changes can be interpreted in many different ways. Why is there no input from, for instance, the Global Warming Policy Foundation?

Sir David King, ever critical of government committees, thought that the CCC were not capable of interpreting the climate situation and giving suitable advice. He has recently formed the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), with 14 experts from ten nations, which ‘aims to have more of an international reach and provide the global public with regular analysis about efforts to tackle the global heating and biodiversity crises’.

Notice that ‘Crisis’ in the title. Their June 2021 report sets out to justify that loaded word, line after line, paragraph by paragraph. The impression is that unless we do something today, or at the latest tomorrow, we are doomed.

The real crisis is in what they are recommending. ‘Targeted repair is needed,’ the report states, ‘for those parts of the climate system that have gone beyond their tipping points.’ It quotes three examples: refreezing the Arctic, ‘marine cloud brightening’ (a technique that aims to create whiter clouds in order to reflect more sunlight back to space) and solar radiation management ‘through the engineered installation of compounds into the stratosphere’.

Here we have an additional committee, unofficial, saying we should conduct experiments on the Arctic, in our atmosphere, and on the oceans. These projects (called geo-engineering) have been much discussed for years, but many scientists have expressed grave concerns about conducting potentially uncontrollable experiments on our planet.

The media are doing their best to make us believe that we need to be rescued by science. Every outbreak of unusual weather is now apparently caused by global warming. Temperatures, rainfall, forest fires, tornadoes, flooding, droughts, every new record is seen as indisputable evidence. This line of reasoning is nowhere more evident than in the CCAG report quoted above.

England has the longest temperature record in the world: 362 years from 1659. Nowhere else has measurements of temperature, rainfall or anything else for even half that. The last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. We therefore only have data (though only for England and only for temperature) for 3 per cent of that time. If 97 per cent of world weather data is unknown, records will be broken for hundreds of years to come.

MPs without a scientific background are reluctant to challenge or question the advice given by their committees. But we cannot let these mysteriously selected and unbelievably single-minded bodies tell us what we must do. Covid-19 and our climate are both very complex subjects. There are many different, strongly held and soundly-based opinions about how to deal with both. We need to hear them all.

In the Covid-19 nightmare we have had only one group of scientists telling us what to do, when to do it, and how. In the growing hysteria about the global warming ‘crisis’ it seems as if we will again have only one source of advice.

July 13, 2021 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Fit for 55 — EU Green Deal and the Industrial Collapse of Europe

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 12.07.2021

One of the rare honest statements by Bill Gates was his remark in early 2021 that if you think covid measures are bad, wait until the measures for global warming. The European Union is in the process of imposing, top-down, the most draconian measures to date, that will effectively destroy modern industry across the face of the 27 states of the European Union. Under cute names such as “Fit for 55” and European Green Deal, measures are being finalized in Brussels by unelected technocrats that will cause the worst industrial unemployment and economic collapse since the crisis of the 1930s. Industries such as automobile or transport, power generation and steel are on the chopping block, all for an unproven hypothesis called manmade global warming.

While most EU citizens have been distracted by endless restrictions over a flu-like pandemic called covid19, the technocrats at the EU Commission in Brussels have been preparing a program of planned dis-integration of the EU industrial economy. The convenient aspect of an unelected supranational group far away in Brussels or Strasbourg is that they are not accountable to any real voters. They even have a name for it: Democratic Deficit. If the measures about to be finalized by the EU Commission under German President Ursula von der Leyen and Vice President for Global Warming Dutch technocrat Frans Timmermans, are enacted, here is a hint of what will happen.

Fit for 55”

On July 14, the EU Commission presents its “Fit for 55” green agenda. While the title sounds more like an ad for a middle-ager health studio, it will be the most draconian and destructive de-industrialization program ever imposed outside of war.

Fit for 55 will be the central framework of new laws and rules from Brussels to reduce CO2 emissions dramatically, using schemes such as carbon taxes, emission caps and cap and trade schemes.

In April 2021 the EU Commission announced a new EU climate target: Emissions to be reduced by 55 percent by 2030 compared to 1990, up from the 40 percent as previously agreed. Hence the cute name “Fit for 55.” But the industry and workforce of the EU states will be anything but fit if the plan is advanced. Simply said, it is technocratic fascism being imposed without public debate on some 455 million EU citizens.

This Fit for 55 is the first time in the world that a group of countries, the EU, officially imposes an agenda to force an absurd “Zero” CO2 by 2050 and 55% less CO2 by 2030. EU Green Deal czar, Commissioner Frans Timmermans said in May, “We will strengthen the EU Emissions Trading System, update the Energy Taxation Directive, and propose new CO2 standards for cars, new energy efficiency standards for buildings, new targets for renewables, and new ways of supporting clean fuels and infrastructure for clean transport.” In reality it will destroy the transport industry, steel, cement as well as coal and gas fuel electric generation.

Here are major parts of the sinister Fit For 55.

Cars and Trucks

A major target of the EU Green Deal will be measures that will force internal combustion engine vehicles– gasoline or diesel cars and trucks—to adhere to such punitive CO2 emission limits that they will be forced off the roads by 2030 if not sooner. The plan will change the current target of a 37.5% reduction in vehicle CO2 emissions by 2030 to a rumored zero emissions by 2035.

On July 7 a coalition of trade unions, transport industry companies and suppliers including the European Trade Union Confederation and the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, wrote an urgent appeal to EU Green Czar Frans Timmermans. They stated, “… we want to see industrial transformation and innovation in Europe, rather than de-industrialisation and social disruption.” The letter pointed out that the EU has no plans for a so-called “Just Transition” for the EU auto industry including no new skills training for displaced workers: “Currently, there is no such framework for the 16 million workers in our mobility eco-system, and notably Europe’s automotive sector which is a powerhouse of industrial employment.”

This is no minor issue as the transition from internal combustion engine cars and trucks to E-autos will mean a huge unprecedented disruption to the present auto supplier chains. The letter points out that EU-wide, the auto sector has 8.5% of all European manufacturing jobs and in 2019 produced nearly 10% of GDP in Germany alone, along with 40% of the country’s research and development spending. The EU today makes up more than 50% of the world’s exports of auto products. They point out that the transition to zero CO2 vehicles will mean a loss of at least 2.4 million skilled, high-wage jobs across the EU. Entire regions will become depressed. The letter points out that Brussels has yet to even map the consequences for the auto sector of the Green Deal.

In April German EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen indicated Fit for 55 could extend a draconian carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) from beyond power plants or industry to cover road transport and buildings in a “polluter pays” add on. The tie to the ETS will automatically force financial penalties on drivers or home owners beyond the present carbon taxes despite a very limited impact of some 3% on emissions. This, on top of tighter auto emission standards, will deal a killer blow to consumers and industry. When the French government imposed such a carbon tax in 2018 it triggered the Yellow Vests national protests and forced Paris to withdraw it.

Steel

The drastic EU plan contains new provisions that will mean drastic change for the energy-intensive EU steel and cement industries. Steel is the second biggest industry in the world after oil and gas. Currently the EU is the second largest producer of steel in the world after China. Its output is over 177 million tons of steel a year, or 11% of global output. But the Timmermans plan will introduce new measures that ostensibly penalize steel imports from “dirty” producers, but that in fact will make EU steel less competitive globally. Leaks of the EU plan indicate that they plan to eliminate current free ETS pollution permits for energy-intensive industries such as steel or cement. That will deal a devastating blow to both essential industries. They call it the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. As the Center for European Policy Network points out, EU steel exporters will “not receive any compensation for the discontinuation of the free allocation. As a result, they suffer considerable competitive disadvantages compared to their competitors from third countries.“

Coal Carbon Taxes

The EU’s new 55% climate target for 2030 implies a near-complete coal phase-out by 2030 in the whole EU. This will hit Germany, far the largest EU coal power user. The German government, already with the world’s most expensive electric power owing to the Merkel Energiewende transition to unreliable solar and wind that will see the last nuclear power plant closed in 2022, has just recently dropped its plan to phase out coal by 2038. It will phase out far earlier, but for obvious political reasons in an election year, has not revealed its new “zero coal” date.

The absurdity of believing the EU, especially Germany, will be able to achieve zero coal by 2030, replacing not even with natural gas, but rather unreliable solar and wind, is already clear. On January 1, 2021 as part of the Government mandate on coal power reduction, 11 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 4.7 GW were shut down. That phase out lasted eight days as several of the coal power plants had to be reconnected to the grid to avoid blackouts due to a prolonged low-wind period. The shut coal plants were ordered to operate on reserve status at the cost of the consumers. The Berlin government commission that drafted the coal phase-out plan included no power industry representatives nor any power grid experts.

With the new element of the destructive EU Commission Fit for 55 plan, the heart of European industry, Germany, is pre-programmed not only for severe industrial unemployment in steel, cement and auto sectors. It is also pre-programmed for power blackouts such as that that devastated Texas in early 2021 when wind mills froze. In 2022 in Germany, as noted, the last nuclear plant along with other coal power will be closed, removing 3% of the power. An added 6,000 wind turbines also will exit due to age, for a total cut of 7%. Yet planned addition of new wind and solar doesn’t come close to replace that, so that by 2022 Germany could have a shortfall of between 10% and 15% in capacity on the generation side.

WEF Great Reset and EU Green Deal

The hard thing for ordinary sane citizens to grasp with this EU Fit for 55 and the Davos Great Reset or the related UN Agenda 2030 globally, is that it is all a deliberate technocratic plan for dis-integration of the economy, using the fraudulent excuse of an unproven global warming danger that claims– based on dodgy computer models that ignore influence of our sun on Earth climate cycles– that we will see catastrophe by 2030 if the world does not slash harmless and life-essential CO2 emissions.

The ever-active Davos World Economic Forum as part of its Great Reset is also playing a significant role in shaping the EU Commission’s Europe Green Deal. In January 2020, the World Economic Forum at its Annual Meeting in Davos brought together leaders from industry and business with Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans to explore how to catalyze the European Green Deal. The July 14 unveiling by Brussels is the result. The WEF supports the CEO Action Group for the European Green Deal to get major corporations behind the Brussels dystopian plan

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.

July 13, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | 1 Comment

The pandemic lies, according to Piers Corbyn

By Daniel Miller | The Conservative Woman | July 2, 2021

PIERS Corbyn is a well-known committed campaigner in the fight to stop the New Normal / New World Order / World Economic Forum being imposed on us all. He’s also a physicist, astro-physicist, long-range weather forecaster and former councillor.

Daniel Miller: You’ve been campaigning against the lockdowns and related matters since the very beginning. When did you first realise the pandemic narrative was a deliberate lie?

Piers Corbyn: About a week. I was always wary of these things because of the climate issue and I looked into what was happening and I understood these lockdowns were about control. I organised a few demonstrations in Glastonbury town centre and got back to London and met others (around May 9, 2020) who were attempting to do things in London. But things developed quite slowly at first, before we had a big breakthrough in August, getting 50,000 people to Trafalgar Square.

DM: The launch of the pandemic narrative was obviously very shocking and confusing . . .

PC: It was cleverly done. They had all corners covered.

DM: Do you feel you have a good theoretical understanding of the forces driving it forward?

PC: I think so. There are different interest groups coming together to make this and there could be splits between them. The Chinese want to carry on building their economy, and world domination in due course. Wall Street and the mega corporations want to defend their rate of profit. And at the same time, there’s the depopulation agenda of Bill Gates and others. I don’t think the big pharmaceutical companies want to simply depopulate everybody, they want to sell more vaccines. But Gates and others do want to reduce world population. They openly talk about that.

DM: There seems to be a strong connection with the green agenda with what used to be calling global warming and now is called climate change.

PC: Yes, that is their underlying religion, if you like . . . it’s an ideology that justifies anything that they want to do.

DM: This ideology is focused specifically on carbon emissions. It isn’t a holistic concern with the environment but only with this metric. In fact the green revolution is going to lead to massive environmental destruction, because they going to need to mine huge quantities of raw materials to create the new green infrastructure. But as you say, the climate change narrative is clearly useful from the point of view of centralising power. It means that governments can regulate in a way that will enable them to expand their control over society and the economy, in partnership with corporations. And this is also the point of the pandemic narrative.

PC: All governments love a crisis, and this one is a fantastic crisis for the governments of the world. And countries in Africa which have stood out against of course have found their Presidents murdered, in Tanzania and Burundi.

DM: One wonders who is handling that side of the operation.

PC: Yes, who is it? I haven’t seen any attempt to determine that.

DM: There are parts of America now which are much more clearly opposed, in particular in Florida. For whatever reason DeSantis was able to take that position, at least for now. In Britain on the other hand they seem very firmly in control, not only of the government, but also the parliamentary opposition led officially by Sir Keir  Starmer, who seems to have been been ordered to support the government in whatever they decide to do.

PC: That’s right, and they even call for stronger measures. What is Starmer all about? I think he’s a hyper-globalist and has been supporting this agenda for a long time. I first met him years ago in a Red-Green alliance meeting in Camden, and he just waffled, he made no sense at all.

DM: Beyond Starmer, the wider Left hasn’t offered any opposition. It seems to me they’ve been co-opted. You see this in the United States where ‘Leftism’ became the ideology of the professional managerial class. It evacuated the worker dimension, and shifted to policing cultural issues.

PC: Hate speech and identity politics have destroyed the Left, and I think it’s deliberate. Because class analysis is now completely absent, which is why American workers were supporting Trump. When that began to happen I was quite bemused. But it makes sense because the Democratic Party is now just serving Wall Street interests . . .

DM: And Silicon Valley interests, and military industrial  interests . . .

PC: And anything goes. The idea that a Leftist party can support the indiscriminate bombing and destruction of a country like Libya is just unbelievable, but that’s what they did.

DM: Some see the current political climate as an expression of the triumph of Leftism, or some form of Marxism. On the other hand, the Marxism now taught in universities or advanced in Leftist media appears to have been modified to support Democratic Party interests, and the people still committed to a more classical Marxist analysis are sidelined and repressed. This occurs from the Left, which is concerned with disciplining activism and channeling it into directions that create divisions and antagonism.

PC: The question must be, with respect to the Left, what percentage of activity is actually instigated by infiltrators and police agents.

DM: There almost seems to be a natural law of infiltration where eventually you reach a point where the Chief of Police is also the Head of the Anarchists . . .

PC: Yes!

DM: I want to ask you about your own background. Many people know you as Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, but your training is in meteorology, and you’ve been an activist for a long time. 

PC: Yes, I’m a physicist, a theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, and I run a long range weather forecasting operation which sells forecasts to farmers, commodity traders, the energy industry and others, and has been quite successful. As for my brother, I’m older than him for a start. And I was better known around the world than he was until he started to attempt to be the leader of the Labour Party. He was always a member of the Labour Party, whereas I was in groups more involved in direct action. He was always more involved with the trade unions. But we worked together in the miners’ strike for example, where there was a lot of direct action, and he was coming from a trade union point of view. But at the start of his leadership campaign I said to him, you should make it clear that the other candidates are ‘Tory light’ and you’re different. And he said, that’s right, and that’s what he did, and that succeeded. And it’s true, because he does have a different perspective from the others. But he failed at the last hurdle because he was forced into a complete muddle over BrexitAnd that was really the end of his great story at the upper levels of the Labour Party, although he still has a very important following.

DM: Your brother’s silence in the last eighteen months has been quite noticeable.

PC: No, he’s acquiesced basically and made minor comments . . . A lot of people in the anti-lockdown movement were, and some of them still are, supporters of Jeremy, and they come up to me in demonstrations and say, Piers, we supported your brother, where is he? Does he believe in all this? And I tell them, well, he’s a prisoner of the trade unions. And you’ve seen what’s happened. The authorities have been very clever. They thought about it a long time ahead, how to control the Labour movement, and because the Labour movement in Britain, all Labour movements, but especially Britain, is what I would call ‘economistic’. They don’t think very politically, they just think, where’s the money coming from? Anybody’s who has done any analysis, and Jeremy should have done this too, should have realised that this is the slow death of British industry, and those jobs will be destroyed.  But they are just not facing up to it.

DM: The future of public services in Britain looks bleak. It seems that the government’s plan is to destroy them, and then package the market to corporations like Microsoft. And this is how the post-automation underclass is going to be managed in the future, with digital communications, UBI [universal basic income] and pharmaceutical interventions to ensure compliance.

PC: Yes, total privatisation. You can see that people are going to be asked to defend the NHS by people like Starmer and my brother, and they are going to reply, ‘What are we defending? The NHS has been failing to help people with cancer, injecting people with a lethal vaccine, there’s been a suppression of treatment, what are we defending?’

DM: From a Machiavellian perspective I suppose you have to hand it to them, because the government has in effect destroyed the NHS while repeating all the time we have to save it. Meanwhile they are making it as difficult as possible to have a good experience in schools. Here at least there is a possible path which might actually be quite positive, from the point of view of a more decentralised education system. But only for some.

PC: A lot of parents are actually taking their children out. And that’s interesting because if you get a high percentage of parents who take their children out and home-school I wonder where that will go, because you have private enterprises that will pop up and say we can look after your kids and have a private independent schools then the whole thing will become privatised.

DM: What do you think is politically the path forward for people who want to resist what’s happening?

PC: The main way to stop this is not begging the government; we do actually have to break their impositions and if we don’t break them we’re going to lose. People have to go to work when they’re not supposed to, they’ve got to rip down all the signs. If people defy in sufficient numbers the whole agenda of the other side becomes irrelevant because people will be working, and will be having an economy, and so forth. What happens then, I don’t know. Formally the main decisions are made in Parliament even if Johnson and others are being told what to do. So we’re building a party in order to compete on the level but of course we’re tiny compared to existing forces. Politically the key issues now are accountability and democracy versus globalist diktats, and the Left and Right issues are really a diversion. The way forward has to be massive grassroots resistance, physical, legal resistance, and stopping the implementation of the New World Order. This also requires political organisation which is why we set up Let London Live. The primary thing is that we have to be a movement and build a movement and that’s what we’re doing.

DM: The vaccine passports is now clearly the aim that they’re trying to pursue.

PC: Yes, the vaccine seems to be at the centre of their strategy. Now what is the vaccine programme about? It’s not about public health. It is about control, mental control, ideological control, and they do want to kill people, I have no doubt about that. I think a lot of people will die. The powers that be are desperate now to rush out more vaccines, and to vaccinate children, before people realise what’s going on.

DM: Already the casualties from the new experimental vaccines are unprecedented compared with other vaccination programmes.

PC: Yes, in America more people have died from this vaccine than have died from all of the other vaccines in the USA in the past.

DM: Probably one should be generous to their position intellectually, as its unusual for people to self-consciously pursue evil. People want to believe that what theyre doing is necessary. What they seem to believe in is the rational, scientific management of global populations. You see this already with the formation of the Fabian Society in the nineteenth century, which is still very active, and later with people like Julian Huxley, H G Wells and others. A lot of this seems to have been in the works for a long time and suddenly switched on. Evidently not everybody knows all the steps, but only some.

PC: That’s right.

DM: It is very difficult to speak to many of our contemporaries about this matter. It seems like there is a kind of mental block . . .

PC: Exactly, it’s difficult to believe they want to kill us. But I’ve come to the conclusion that actually they do, they really are trying to kill a lot of the population. We need to have a principled united front against all these measures. And the vaccines have to be stopped altogether.

July 2, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Boris Johnson wanted to reduce the global population

Meryl Nass, MD | June 30, 2021

Global over-population is the real issue

… It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet. Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?

This is not, repeat not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the economy.

This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race.

All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn’t it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?

https://www.boris-johnson.com/2007/10/25/global-population-control/

June 30, 2021 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , | 2 Comments

Cape Town and Dubai battle over Africa’s energy future

This major skirmish could determine the outcome of Africa’s fight for energy freedom

By Duggan Flanakin | Watts Up With That? | June 23, 2021

It was quite a shock to Africa Energy Chamber Executive Director NJ Ayuk – and an even bigger shock to the Chamber – that the London-based Hyve group decided to move the annual Africa Oil Week from Cape Town, South Africa to Dubai. It was such a shock that the AEC shortly afterward announced it was sponsoring Africa Energy Week on the same weekend (November 8-12) as the (Out of) Africa Oil Week.

Mr. Ayuk works hard to ensure the interests of African companies and citizens in African energy ventures are widely recognized. He calls the dueling conferences a major confrontation between “Cancel Fossil Fuels” (Dubai) and “Protect our Oil and Gas Industry” (Cape Town).

The Cancel Fossil Fuels movement is currently being led by the International Energy Agency, which recently declared that all oil and gas exploration must cease immediately in order to achieve compliance with the Paris climate accords – and save the world from the mythical fires of hell on Earth.

The Biden-Harris Administration, the European Union, many Western banks and now even Western insurance companies claim the world faces a “climate catastrophe” if we “cling” to fossil fuels. They are lying, of course. There is no actual catastrophe on the horizon. And they know it!

The hysteria in the press (hereherehere and here, for example) is exceeded only by the screeching of Hollywood actors like Leonardo di Caprio and Don Cheadle. Newspaper reports tout compliance with Paris as a litmus test (one of many) for determining one’s humanity.

The hoopla has been so successful that a recent Pew Research Center poll found fully a third of Americans now favor a full-on extinction of fossil fuels and engines that run on them. Only 64% of Americans prefer keeping fossil fuels in the energy mix. This in a nation with 270 million gasoline-powered vehicles and who knows how many gas furnaces and water heaters!

Hardly a day goes by without some entity virtue-signaling disdain for fossil fuels. The media imply that “no fossil fuels by 2050” is “the future.” They are dead wrong. Litigation attorney Francis Menton hit the nail on the head in a recent real-world post: “The current legal onslaught is unlikely to limit world oil production significantly.”

Menton acknowledges the “multi-front legal onslaught” against the “major” oil producing companies (not countries!). The war is not confined to lawsuits. Other weapons include new laws, regulatory initiatives and proxy contests. However, as Menton demonstrates, the oft-targeted “major” Western oil companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Conoco Phillips) “are just not that big a part of world production.”

ExxonMobil, the largest of the group, was ranked just sixth, and Chevron was the only other “major” in the top ten. The top five are Saudi Aramco, Rosneft (Russia), Kuwait Petroleum, National Iranian Oil Company and China National. When is the last time you saw legal actions, major demonstrations or even public demands that those oil giants shut down?

Despite all the official kowtowing to Paris and even the IEA, not even all Western nations have any real intention of decarbonizing. Norway, for example, has openly stated its intention to increase its investments in offshore oil and gas operations in 2021. Of course, in an official “woke” statement, the Norwegian government promised to facilitate long-term economic growth in the petroleum industry “within the framework of our climate policy and our commitments under the Paris Agreement.” Huh?

Meanwhile, the Norwegian Oil and Gas Association bluntly stated that its members do not share “the assumption that OPEC members alone should account for more than half of oil and gas production for the world market in a 2050 perspective.” The reasons are obvious.

First, the result would be soaring energy prices and significant threats to global energy supplies. Second, Norway would lose revenues and jobs associated with industries like oil and gas, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and recovery of seabed minerals.

Africans like Ayuk share similar views: that their countries cannot afford to throw away their best chances for economic growth, full employment, infrastructure development and modern living standards – to satisfy the whims and demands of wealthy Europeans.

To underscore their determination, Canada-based Reconnaissance Energy Africa is on the verge of turning the Namibian part of the Kavango Basin into a world oil capital. Exploratory drilling within the 8.5-million-acre Kavango Basin has confirmed that “Namibia is endowed with an active onshore petroleum basin,” says Namibia Minister of Mines and Energy Tom Alweendo. The country hopes oil and gas development will bring economic stimulus, increased infrastructure, access to potable water, and investments in environmental protection and wildlife conservation.

Just last year the Russian firm Rosgeo signed an agreement with Equatorial Guinea for an historic geological mapping project – the first step toward developing a domestic oil and gas industry and finding other mineral resources. (Guinea withdrew from Africa Oil Week in favor of Africa Energy Week.)

An earlier report identified 70 crude oil and natural gas projects planned for startup in sub-Saharan Africa between 2019 and 2025; it also said Nigeria would be producing over a million barrels of oil per day (BOPD) by 2025.

Two of Africa’s five largest oil and gas projects are in Mozambique: the state-of-the-art Mozambique liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, which plans to tap into an estimated 75 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of recoverable offshore natural gas, and the 85-tcf Area 4 project, which includes the Coral and Rovuma LNG facilities.

BP just awarded a billion-dollar contract for construction of phase 1 of the 15-tcf Tortue Ahmeyim offshore LNG project, which benefits Mauritania and Senegal. Shell is planning to begin construction in 2022 of a $30 billion LNG liquefaction plant in Tanzania, which has over 57 tcf of recoverable natural gas reserves. And the East African Crude Oil Pipeline intends to transport crude oil from Kabaale-Hoima in Uganda to the Tanzanian port of Tanga.

None of these energy-rich African nations is eager to submit to IEA demands, which seem to envision only existing OPEC nations as future producers and refiners. This, it appears, is the dividing line between Africa Oil Week and the new Africa Energy Week.

A leading theme of Africa Oil Week in Dubai is “Africa’s energy transition efforts toward a cleaner environment.” The Dubai event asks, “As the pressure mounts for regions, countries and companies to meet the Paris Agreement targets on eliminating carbon emissions, where does the continent stand?” (Resistance. Is. Futile. attendees want Africans to believe.)

Africa Energy Week has already garnered an impressive list of speakers, sponsors and attendees. It has a much different theme – and no lack of chutzpah. “Replacing Africa Oil Week” is the goal. The creators say their event “seeks to unite industry stakeholders, international speakers, and movers and shakers from the African oil and gas sector … to define and promote the African energy agenda through development, deal-making and private sector participation.”

Key topics at Africa Energy Week include making energy poverty history before 2030, the future of the African oil and gas industry, the role of women in energy, and opportunities and financial challenges. The AEC says this Africa-focused, in-person energy event is fully devoted to promoting African development and growth through African-held programs.

Ayuk says that the AOW’s move to Dubai provided an opportunity for Africans to stand up for African values. “We are going to fight for our future. We are not going to give in to this crowd. I am not worried about the attacks. We are going to stand for what is right.”

Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org).

June 26, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

What is Biden’s “Build Back Better World” (B3W)?

By Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook – 22.06.2021

Announced at the archaic “Group of 7” summit (G7) in mid-June – the “Build Back Better World” (B3W) initiative is billed by Western governments and the Western corporate media as a plan that “could rival” China’s One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR).

Yet even its announcement – surely the easiest phase of the overall initiative – fell flat. Not a single actual example was provided of what B3W would provide prospective partners beyond the vaguest platitudes and most ambiguous commitments.

A “fact sheet” provided by the White House for what is essentially a US-led project  – rather than clarify or solidify B3W’s vision – instead seems to suggest the “initiative” is serving as a rebranding exercise behind which US meddling abroad will continue.

The White House document mentions, “Development Finance Corporation, USAID, EXIM, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the US Trade and Development Agency,” as being involved – all of which are admittedly arms of US political interference abroad, not agencies involved in driving actual development.

USAID – for example – is mentioned by name 40 times in the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s counterinsurgency manual (PDF) which describes the tools and techniques the US military can use to defeat insurgency abroad – tools and techniques that are admittedly just as useful at undermining, overthrowing, and replacing a targeted government with.

In many instances, “counterinsurgency” strategies are employed by the US for precisely this purpose – cementing in power a client regime selected by the US to replace a targeted government toppled by Washington. USAID’s role is augmenting the insurgency-counterinsurgency strategy, not actually spurring development in any given country.

Other pillars of B3W like the “Millennium Challenge Corporation” qualify development through influencing policymaking.

One project on the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s official website featured in a post titled, “Social Inclusion in MCC’s Mongolia Compact: Affordable Water for all in Ulaanbaatar,” illustrates that US-funded “development” in Mongolia regarding “affordable water for all” is not building physical infrastructure that actually brings affordable water for all – but instead consists of conducting surveys and pressuring policymakers.

Rather than images of American construction crews building pipelines, digging wells, or putting up permanent water towers serving entire communities, the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s website features people with clipboards knocking on doors.

Myanmar: A “Sneak Peak” at America’s B3W in Action

Instead of actual development, US “development” agencies like these often channel money into political opposition groups specifically to block the construction of national infrastructure that would solve issues like energy, water, and food shortages – often predicated on false socio-political pretexts like “human rights” and “environmental” concerns.

In Myanmar for example, US government-funded opposition groups have worked for years to block the construction of Chinese-led projects including dams that would generate electricity, contribute to flood control, and aid in agricultural irrigation.

Wikileaks in a 2010 US diplomatic cable titled, “Burma: Grassroots Opposition to Chinese-backed Dam in Northern Burma,” would reveal US diplomats discussing the success of US embassy-funded “grassroots” opposition groups blocking Chinese-initiated dams. The cable noted:

An unusual aspect of this case is the role grassroots organizations have played in opposing the dam, which speaks to the growing strength of civil society groups in Kachin State, including recipients of Embassy small grants.

Once projects like dams, roads, rails, or ports are blocked in targeted nations like Myanmar, no Western alternative is ever offered.

Instead, organizations like USAID provide provisional infrastructure like solar panels and ad-hoc water towers providing recipient communities with minimum living standards. The goal is to disrupt unifying national projects and encourage local communities to make do without modern infrastructure. This in itself aids in arresting development across entire regions – allowing the US to artificially maintain “primacy” over them. This also contributes to separatism, with communities dependent on US handouts rather than working with their own nation’s government  – which in Myanmar in particular has been the source of decades of armed conflict. This conflict also further arrests development.

All of this is in stark contrast to China’s OBOR which is building physical infrastructure that is transporting goods and people across entire regions and providing food, energy, and water for a growing number of people around the globe – all without political strings attached or armies of foreign-funded “activists” commandeering national policymaking and in turn, hijacking national sovereignty.

Nations have already tangibly benefited from Chinese-led infrastructure projects – including nations like Myanmar where projects have been completed. These include roads, bridges, and dams.

The Irrawaddy Bridge (also known as the Yadanabon Bridge) built by China CAMC Engineering and completed in 2008 – for example – finally allows heavy vehicles to cross the Irrawaddy River from the nation’s northwest to Mandalay and the nation’s interior beyond without using cumbersome ferries.

Also built with China’s help is the Yeywa Dam commissioned in 2010. It includes the nation’s largest hydroelectric power plant, providing energy to nearby Mandalay. It also significantly contributes to flood control.

Opposed to its construction was the so-called “Burma Rivers Network” – an extension of “International Rivers” – funded by Western corporate foundations like Open Society, the Ford Foundation, and the Sigrid Rausing Trust – all admittedly working in parallel with fronts like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to advance US government foreign policy objectives.

Burma Rivers Network made claims regarding the dam including that the power would “likely” be “transmitted to China” – a claim that was and is completely false. The network also made baseless claims that villagers were “forcibly relocated without compensation” and that the dam would jeopardize their livelihood. This livelihood included unsustainable fishing and logging along the river – a livelihood necessitated by a previous lack of infrastructure needed for modern and sustainable economic opportunities.

As other adjacent projects to the Yeywa Dam are either proposed or in the process of being built – these same US-backed networks work tirelessly to derail compensation, relocation, and even public hearings to discuss either in the first place.

In some cases – like the proposed and partially constructed Myitsone Dam – work has been halted by not only US-funded opposition groups politically obstructing progress, but also by armed attacks by US-backed separatist groups.

The Guardian in a 2014 article titled, “Burmese villagers exiled from ancestral home as fate of dam remains unclear,” would admit:

As work got underway, the Kachin Independence Army broke a 17-year-old ceasefire to attack the dam site. In 2010, 10 bombs exploded around the dam site, killing a Chinese worker.

Kachin separatism is openly encouraged by the US as revealed through a series of leaked cables and the US government’s funding of Kachin separatist groups listed on the National Endowment for Democracy’s official website.

While the example of US interference in Myanmar and its open determination to arrest development is an extreme one – it is essentially the same process used around the globe to address – as the White House “fact sheet” regarding B3W calls it, “competition with China.”

It is also a “sneak peak” at what B3W will actually entail. Were it a genuine infrastructure drive – actual projects would have been showcased upon its inauguration. Instead, hand-waving and platitudes were used as stand-ins where real infrastructure projects should have been – an assurance that the US was merely rebranding its ongoing efforts to derail not just Chinese-led development worldwide – but development itself.

For a declining empire to maintain “primacy” over areas of the planet as the US insists it must do regarding the Indo-Pacific region – the only way to remain on top is to make sure everyone is declining at an equal or greater rate than the US – even if it means Washington knocking these nations down itself.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

June 23, 2021 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment